The first of four films that Lindsay Anderson considered Humphrey Jennings'
best work, Words For Battle was described by the filmmaker himself as being
"about the Lincoln statue in Parliament Square". This seems a curious definition
for a documentary originally known as In England Now, which marries excerpts
from major passages of English poetry and prose with footage of the
contemporary, war-afflicted landscape, and in which Lincoln's statue only
appears at the very end. But it makes sense of the whole trajectory of the film
and of Jennings' underlying theme.

In the first chapter, we descend from the rolling clouds - a Godlike
viewpoint looking down on England - into the fields and provincial towns, to
eye-level with the local people. This movement is repeated in each succeeding
passage - the camera watching from above as schoolchildren are evacuated before
settling among them as they play on the river - until it reaches its climax with
the people flocking past the Lincoln Statue. As narrator Laurence Olivier
reaches the passage "The government of the people, by the people, and for the
people" from the Gettysburg Address, the camera fixes on Big Ben, before moving
in among the passing tanks and then the bystanders on their way to work.
Clearly, the sequence is meant to appeal to an American audience and act as a
call to arms but, more importantly, it underlines Jennings' belief in the
ordinary man and woman as both the nation's driving force and the rightful
beneficiaries of victory in war. That's why this paean to England ends not with
Churchill, the bulwark of British Imperialism, but with a spokesman from the New
World - and, not coincidentally, for a new order.